USA Today has uncovered this important news story about what happens when you try to come in the US without fingerprints. Spoiler alert: It’s a bit harder to get through customs but not a big deal, really. This excerpt from the end of the article sums it up:
In the world, an estimated one in 50 [...]
In my previous post, I talked about why Michael Steele’s “economics argument against gay marriage” isn’t an argument against gay marriage at all. However, my counter-argument didn’t really address whether or not marriage itself actually does impose a burden on businesses, which I’m not sure that it does. I’m fairly certain that subsidizing marriage imposes [...]
When I first saw this USA Today article about Michael Steel’s “new arguments” against gay marriage, I decided not to blog about it because I thought that the counter-argument was amazingly obvious. Amazingly, Keith Olbermann picked up the story and somehow managed to completely miss how fucking stupid Steele’s argument is while countering with his [...]
In response to this post on the economics of panhandling, Jurij made a detailed case for why giving money to homeless people isn’t the cause of homelessness. I will start out by saying that I completely agree that giving money to homeless people is not the sole cause of homelessness. I also agree that [...]
For those who don’t know, the city I live in (Berkeley, CA), and the bay area in general, is absolutely teeming with homeless people. Their ubiquity was one of the more annoying things that I had to adjust to when I first moved here – it seemed like everywhere I went and no matter what [...]
I’ve been pretty busy and haphazard this week and I’ve been remiss in my posting duties. Hopefully I’ll have one post finished for tonight and I’ll try and make up for my absences by posting two posts per day next week if possible.
In an effort to organize my thoughts on the experience, I think that I am going to start with the occasional status report on how this little experiment is going and how my expectations are changing. So far, things are going basically as expected. Looking over what I’ve written, I can see that there is [...]
In part one of this two-part series, I introduced my thoughts on how logic can be used to extract (but not introduce) information from the premises using 4×4 su doku with no unique solution. In this follow-up post, my intention was to discuss the more subtle forms of information extraction that can be done with [...]
As a follow up to yesterday’s post on intellectual rigor and a precursor to later posts on logical discourse, I think it’s important for me to write a post or two explaining my mental model of what logic does and does not do. Also, I just saw
Neal McCluskey over at Cato does a fantastic job taking apart a USA Today story on student loans. His article brings up an interesting point about the use of human interest stories in journalism. If you read the original article, you’ll see that the reporter plays a devious rhetorical trick on the reader – they [...]
Physical chemistry Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and all around curious guy.